Privacy, Apple, and the FBI

I assert that there is a certain profoundness in the 1890 article that is missing from the 1975 article. The Harvard Law Review article (Harvard Law Review, Volume 4, No. 5 (Dec. 15, 1890), pp. 193-220 dates from a period with telephones were not in wide spread usage, and certainly telephones of a cellular or wireless nature had not yet even been conceived of when the article was written. The 1890 article cites what Judge Cooley calls the right “to be left alone” in reference to “… devices threaten to make good the prediction that “what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops” and while the writer speaks not of the telephone, but rather the concern is of cameras and stethoscopes, and it is the issue of these technological intrusions by either private or government entities which articulates this 1890 article to the present case of the FBI engaging in what is called “security theater” to unlawfully coerce Apple Corporation into creating a tool to permit the FBI to snoop on Apple iPhone users.

There is already a mechanism by which the FBI can obtain the information that are seeking, but evidence collected using the present system is specifically disallowed in U.S. criminal cases, as the present system violates, and has violated for years the 4^th Amendment restrictions opined by the Supreme Court of the United States. Thus, the FBI now seeks a different tool to collect the information in a quasi legal manner, and is trying to bully Apple into designing this software for the FBI, so that what the FBI does utterly illegally, can now have the taint reduced, although not fully removed from such evidence.

Indeed, the FBI seeks a tool that can be used and deployed with zero oversight of the courts, and no accountability other that the politically appointed supervisory agents within the FBI itself. The FBI has a long, long history of disreputable acts with surveillance equipment and tools used to break codes, and perform forensics investigations into technical matters. It is not merely a situation of a small number of rogue agents, who decades ago committed a single acts, in a confusing situation, but rather it is a more a matter of widespread modern wrongdoing, by the greater body of agents, running roughshod, wantonly over the rights of “The People” in the name of national security.

The authors Warren and Brandeis gaze forward in time from 1890 to 2016, and they see the rising tide of technological exploitations, before either the offending agency, or even the technology abused had even been created.